Lin Yao

Lin Yao received the bachelor’s degree in mechanical design, manufacturing and automation from Sichuan University, Sichuan, China, in 2009, the master’s and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2015.

He was a Research Scientist with the Institute of Neurorehabilitation Systems, University Medical Center Göttingen, Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany, within the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience from 2015 to 2016, where he was the Head of the Brain-Computer Interface Laboratory. Since 2016, he has been a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Department of Systems Design Engineering, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada. His research interests include biomedical signal processing and BCI for neurorehabilitation and biomechatronics.

Distinctive EEG signals from the motor and somatosensory cortex are generated during mental tasks of motor imagery (MI) and somatosensory attentional orientation (SAO). In this study, we hypothesize that a combination of these two signal modalities provides improvements in BCI performance with respect to using the two methods separately, and generate novel types of multi-class BCI systems.

We propose a novel calibration strategy to facilitate the decoding of covert somatosensory attentional changes by exploring the oscillatory dynamics induced by actual tactile sensation. Offline analysis showed that the proposed calibration method led to higher accuracies than the traditional calibration method based only on somatosensory attentional orientation (SAO) data.